The recent horticultural export boom in Senegal has created new off-farm wage employment opportunities for the rural population, especially for women. We hypothesise that female wage employment may lower fertility rates through an income effect, an empowerment effect and a substitution effect,...

We analyze the adoption of mineral fertilizer in South-Kivu. We model technology adoption as a three-step-process, including awareness, tryout, and adoption; and empirically analyze these steps using cross-sectional farm-household data, and bivariate and Heckman selection probit models. We find...

Agricultural extension programs often evaluate their gender strategy by the proportion of female participants. However, female participation is not necessarily conducive for reaching program objectives. We analyze whether participation of female farmers in an agricultural extension program in...

Off-farm income constitutes a significant share of the household livelihood portfolios across Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the determinants and dynamics of individuals' participation in off-farm employment activities have not received adequate attention due to the weaknesses in individual-level data...

In this paper we analyse the indirect effects of the boom in horticultural exports in Senegal on child schooling. The export boom has caused a dramatic increase in female off-farm wage employment, which led to increased female bargaining power in the household. We investigate the causal effect...

Developing countries are increasingly exporting fresh horticulture products to high-income countries. These exports increasingly have to comply with stringent public and private standards, as well as other quality and safety issues. There is an ongoing debate on the effect of private standards...

In this paper we analyze the impact of the Integrated Household Extension Program (IHEP) in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia. The government of Ethiopia – in contrast to the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – invests heavily in agricultural extension but very little...

The determinants of the technical efficiency (TE) of adopters and non-adopters of soil and water conservation (SWC) technologies in the upper Rwizi micro-catchment of south-western Uganda are compared using cross-sectional survey data from 246 smallholder farmers. A Cobb-Douglas stochastic...

While recent studies emphasize the importance of firm heterogeneous effects in understanding international trade and its gains, these insights have largely been ignored in the literature on standards. In this paper we analyze how the adoption of private food standards by individual firms affects...

Private standards are increasingly governing international food trade, but little is known about the implications for developing countries. The objective of the study is to provide evidence in the ongoing debate on standards as barrier or catalyst for developing countries’ export. We use the...